Project: Human Enhancement (Rewrite)
by BlueberryAndPancake
Summary: Being an inexperienced scientist, Len didn't know that it was forbidden for him to fall in love with his test subject, a girl who was destined to destroy and be destroyed. But this "test subject" with aquamarine eyes was his long-lost childhood friend. Rewrite of the old version. Please RxR!


**A/N: AYY GUYS so, yes, we did promise a rewrite of this story. Hopefully it's an upgrade from the older version, but if there is anything that still needs improvement, please do tell us! A bit of flaming is okay as well, we like to roast marshmallows.**

 **Disclaimer: Vocaloid is not mine, but the bowl of marshmallows sitting on my kitchen table is.**

* * *

Underground Secrets

* * *

The S.I.N.G. was a building of great novelty and impressive size. Kaito Shion often spoke of it, but to Len Kagamine, all of them were tales half told.

Time seemed to stretch for a preternatural length. Len kept his eyes fixed on a monitor screen hung up in the corner of the main office. It showed a cart with several metal crates being rolled down a corridor made of glass.

What was inside that boxes, he didn't know. Perhaps an android. Some type of dangerous chemical. A GMO banana. (Len only ate 100% organic, GMO free bananas.)

His hands absentmindedly played with his small ponytail, a habit he often did out of excitement or anxiety. He wasn't sure which one it was this time.

In came a woman with short brown hair, wearing a red lab coat with a gold name tag on the breast pocket. _Meiko Sakine_. Her appearance, though staid and tall, seemed to be less daunting than the image Len had in mind, for someone who controlled a major building of an organization with multiple branches. She walked with an air of importance, her heels clicking as she approached him. A gloved hand was extended, and he shook it.

"Len Kagamine, it is my pleasure to have you as a new member of the Underground Laboratory in the Scientific Institution of Nanotechnological Growth."

Her hand retracted and picked up the pencil nestled on her clipboard, marking something down on the papers. "You might be the youngest member we have to date, but I am sure you will be able to accomplish much. Please, sign your name at the bottom here before we proceed. It is your duty to make sure that you adhere to all the rules, and to make sure that all information regarding the S.I.N.G. Underground Laboratory is kept confidential. Understood?"

The voice was calm, businesslike to a point where Len felt a bit too conscious of himself. He quickly scribbled his name on the bottom, barely paying attention to the walls of text on the papers, and handed the clipboard back to Meiko.

She nodded and pushed up her glasses with her left hand. "Very well. Come with me to the elevator. We will be heading over to where you will be working for your first few weeks."

Len followed Meiko over to where an elevator took up an entire wall. Her gloved hand swiped across a panel on the wall with much expertise. A hologram opened up, displaying a screen for voice and fingerprint confirmation, along with a retinal scan.

A beep resounded, and the doors slid open. Len's blue eyes quickly took in the sight of computer screens lined next to the door of the elevator, lines of text and videos playing on the screens, monitoring the activities going on in the many floors down below. The other walls were comprised of thick glass, allowing him to gaze at the wondrous sights below.

Meiko stepped in. The elevator doors closed behind her.

"Elevator, commence."

* * *

When he stepped out of the elevator, Len searched for the color blue.

There was a luminescent flicker of light here, a beaker of copper sulfate solution there.

And Len saw what he was looking for. Amongst the complex machinery, supported on massive pillars of steel, he saw broken reflections of a man's blue hair in the gloss of the surrounding panels. Said person had his back turned to him and Meiko, seemingly focused on the lines of G's and A's and T's and C's in front of him. Next to the machine was an interactive hologram of a pair of lungs.

"Kaito Shion."

The man turned to face the two and nodded, his eyes meeting Len's briefly. "Good morning. So this is Len Kagamine?" His voice was not much different than Meiko's: cool and calm and too formal sounding.

 _It really doesn't suit him well_ , Len thought, and the corner of his lips briefly upturned as he thought of Kaito's usual antics and bellowing laugh.

"Yes. I would like you to introduce him to the basics of the Underground Laboratory today, and to give him a brief tour of the area. Ask Luki for assistance if needed. I will be taking my leave for now, there seems to be a problem with test subject RT-54, in section 2A." And the heels clicked away, the door slammed shut.

Kaito's eyes flitted over to Len, and his usual crooked grin broke out over his face. He pulled the younger male in a sudden embrace, giving a giant shout.

"Congrats, man! I knew you could make it! My God, I've been waiting for this moment for a long time-"

"Woah, Kaito, calm down." Len laughed and returned the hug. "Don't kill me with asphyxiation before I finish my first day here."

Kaito was a tall man, strong-limbed and square-shouldered. The collection of features looked a bit strange in comparison to his twinkling eyes and foolish smile. Len might as well be the very opposite of him in appearance. Sometimes the closest of siblings didn't share the same blood.

 _"So I heard that the action potential in a neuron surpasses the threshold when triggered by depolarization, is that right?" Len had asked seven years ago._

 _Kaito, at fifteen and in his first year of high school, had looked up at his best friend and next door neighbor in surprise. In Kaito's lap sat a thick biology textbook that he had been studying frantically from in the past hour. Eleven-year-old Len thought nothing of his words as he swiveled on a chair, eyes fixated on a graph with the measurements of membrane potential._

 _"Kaito? What's wrong?"_

 _The blue-haired male opened his mouth, closed it, then opened it again. Not a single word came out, save for a confused hum._

 _And Len had just shrugged, his brain thinking and calculating and analyzing in time with each swivel in his chair._

"So what do you think of this place?"

Len's eyes scanned the area. Holograms and machinery took up the room, and walls, lined with control panels, kept the place organized in an odd fashion in spite of its complexity.

"It's cool. Weird. You know, sci-fi stuff you see in movies." Len was staring at a hologram projecting an image of a human's body, his eyes lighting up in curiosity. "Does anyone outside of the institute know about any of this?"

"All of that, my friend, will be kept as classified information." Kaito looked down at him with a theatrically evil glare. "Or they'll come and get you."

"... what?" The younger male gaped at him.

"Just kidding." He cackled and slapped Len on the back. And with that, Kaito was silent again, a slightly troubled look on his face. "Actually, not really kidding. People have gotten in trouble for breaking the rules, leaking out information, stuff like that."

"What happened to them?"

"Ah that, you'll see later on, I guess." Kaito waved his hand in dismissal to his question. "Oh, well, in that case, I better show you around here."

"What's that?" Len immediately jabbed his finger towards the machine Kaito had been working at.

"Oh. This. I have a small research project that I have to turn in by next week, and I was looking up a certain part of my test subject's gene and seeing if there are any medicines that could be administered to... it."

Len thought that Kaito's smile faltered a little

But it all happened so quickly that the blonde dismissed it as an illusion.

"New member, huh." A new voice spoke from behind the two. Len turned around to see a man, similar in stature to Kaito's, except with longer pink hair and ice blue eyes that seemed much less jovial in nature. "I heard he graduated college at an age where most would be entering one. Impressive. No surprise that Ms. Sakine recommended you to come here."

"I, er, yes," Len replied, a bit flustered at the praise. "I'd always been interested in working for a large scientific organization. So I worked really hard in school to fulfill this dream." _Ugh, so horribly cliche._

The man just gave a polite smile. "Well, nice to meet you. I'm Luki Megurine, and I'm one of the managers for the S.I.N.G. Underground Laboratory. I'm sure you will adjust to everything soon enough. In fact, I'll allow you to have a quick look at the Test Subject room, but only for a short while. You can only observe the less complex experiments, and you must take great caution when entering the area. I'll leave it to Kaito."

There was a pair of steel doors on the far end of the room, painted with yellow and black stripes around the edges. On each side of the entrance was a sign with bright red words: _MAXIMUM SECURITY - TESTING UNITS_.

Kaito pushed on the panel located near the doors, entering several lines of long text on the screen.

A robotic female voice resounded from the machine. "Entry permitted. Proceed with caution."

Len stepped in, and his vision was immediately flooded with countless types of animals and plants and organisms that he couldn't name. Guards in the security personnel were wandering around the room, with the occasional scientist passing by.

Barely suppressing his desire to take off and explore the entire room, he walked over to a bright red fish in a glass tank, a strange glow emanating from its body. There were bottles of chemicals scattered around the countertop. Len picked up one. _Luciferin._ His brow furrowed in thought. _It's the pigment for bioluminescence_ _, right? It's pretty common for marine life, so it should have been easy for them to alter the luciferase enzyme gene in the fish._

"Hey Kaito, do you know how the people here modified this fish? It's really cool."

Silence. Len turned around. No Kaito in sight. He shrugged and put the bottle down, continuing on his way, keeping an eye out for any guards walking by.

He bypassed a few other organisms, but a small octopus in a tank piqued his interest. It had an eerily humanlike face and baby pink tentacles. Strangely enough, she resembled Luki a little bit. It certainly wouldn't have been surprising if the creature happened to be a mutant of the pink-haired male and an octopus.

On the glass tank was a label sticker. _Test subject CV03-Variation 2, is it? I'm going to call her Tako for short._

The octopus whined softly and looked at him with sad blue eyes. Her skin was dry and lusterless, and her tentacles were wrapped tightly around a rock jutting out from the pool of dark liquid at the bottom. She refused to touch it. Len had no clue what it could possibly be, but the liquid appeared to rather noxious.

"Poor thing. Who did this to you?" Seeing nobody near him at the moment, he crouched down and took out a container of water from the bottom of a shelf. Len poured the contents into the pool until the color faded away, laughing a little when she smiled and waved her tentacles about. The creature gingerly tested the waters, then tumbled back down into the pool and gave a satisfied sigh.

"Hey!"

Len jumped and scrambled to stick the container of water back into its original spot, trying his best to put on a nonchalant face.

Kaito appeared from the shadows with a cross expression on his face. "Didn't I tell you not to mess with anything here?" He held a bag of something behind his back. Probably food for one of the animals.

"I-I mean, she just looked really hurt, so I figured that a little water could, you know, make her feel better," Len stammered, motioning his hand over to where the octopus was now splashing away happily.

"You can't touch anything that isn't yours, you know? It's lucky that, probably for what you did, nothing much will happen, but if you mess around with a bigger experiment, it might result in something extremely bad," Kaito scolded. The glare in his eyes didn't waver.

"Sorry." Len scratched the back of his head sheepishly.

There was a moment of guilty silence, broken only by the rustling of Kaito's paper bag. Len leaned to the side to get a closer look.

"Um, I'm just curious, but can I ask you wh-"

"No, no, that's enough for today," Kaito interrupted, and he turned around, holding the bag to his chest. "Come along now, kid, it's time for lunch."

* * *

The sun had barely begun its ascent when Len arrived at the Underground Laboratory the next day. He'd only explored a small portion of the Test Subject Room yesterday, and he was eager to see more of it.

Len punched in the passwords Kaito had scribbled down on a slip of paper in secret yesterday. They were all long and complex, and it was quite a relief when he heard the robotic voice and saw the steel doors slide open.

No octopus in sight. Maybe she had been transferred to another place for some other experiment. The fish was still in his tank, glowing brightly and swimming about.

He continued on his journey, stopping every so often to examine a creature or to read an abstract for an ongoing experiment. Strangely enough, there weren't any guards nearby. He figured that there was probably an complex security system wired throughout the entire area, activated for the night.

Around the corner led to a number of long corridors with several doors. He wondered what secrets there were that laid beyond the walls.

Suddenly there was a man's voice and a slam of a door, the jangling of keys and a high-pitched beep.

Len held his breath. Perhaps a scientist was just cleaning up and heading out from his overnight shift. Perhaps it was a security guard. He just hoped it was not someone he knew; if Luki just so happened to show up, there was no doubt that Len would receive a scolding for wandering about. An impulsive wanderlust had always seemed to land him in trouble when he was younger, and unfortunately, not much has changed as time went on.

The man turned around the corner, and Len immediately recognized the familiar face.

"Hey, Kaito, what are you doing here?"

Kaito halted in his steps. "What the- that's what I should be asking! What about you? What are _you_ doing here?"

"Nothing."

"You liar."

"I- fine," Len huffed, hiding his embarrassment. "I just wanted to look around for a bit. I didn't get to see enough stuff yesterday."

Kaito rubbed his temples and sighed. "Clearly what Meiko and I told you yesterday about never breaking the rules has gone in one ear and out another. Maybe you should get a hearing aid? Or would a punishment be needed? Hey, I remember you hate being tickled-"

"Yeah, yeah, remember that the last time you did that, I karate chopped you in the face. Anyhow, what about those leeks, man? Is there an animal here whose diet consists of only leeks and nothing else?" Len lifted an eyebrow and nodded towards the bag in Kaito's arms arms, vaguely recalling the paper bag Kaito had held yesterday.

"Yes. Leeks. What about it?" Kaito snapped a bit too quickly, and Len winced. The his eyes softened up once again, and he placed a hand on the younger male's shoulder. "Look, I'm sorry. It's just the rules here are extremely strict, and that there will be severe consequences if there were to be broken. I just get tense sometimes, okay? Didn't mean to lash out at you."

"Sorry."

"Nah, it's okay." Kaito reverted back to his usual self. "I better go back up. My morning bowl of ice cream is waiting for me. Also gotta reactivate all the security cameras that I hacked for the Test Subject Room. Get moving along, Len."

And Len was left by himself, with Kaito trotting away to eat whatever kind of ice cream that was sitting in the lounge. Probably mint chocolate chip. Kaito always ate mint chocolate chip on Fridays.

Len noticed a room left open by accident, two doors from where the hallway ended and split into two paths. He frowned slightly and snorted. _So much for "maximum security", huh._

His hand was on the doorknob, and he almost pushed it closed, but curiosity took over. _It wouldn't hurt to take a look, right?_ Len peered inside.

Inside was a barred up cage, with a bed, two small doors, not much else. A petite girl sat on the edge of the bed. She looked vaguely familiar to him, like a blurry vision from a past dream. A shudder ran through him; the image reminded him of a prison, and he could not possibly have imagined what reason there would be to lock her up in such an austere place. She appeared to be exhausted, her head bowed over in a way that concealed her face from his view. Her shoulder length blonde hair was similar to his own, but was limp and dirty and matted with a substance the color of dark rust. The color of dried blood.

The girl was, although small in frame and a little ragged, certainly not weak. Len could just barely make out the shape of her muscles, could see that she had the legs of a runner. But he wondered to himself if she had enough to eat.

 _She couldn't possibly be a test subject, right? A human being?_

The girl mumbled something inaudible, and her eyes opened. She turned her head, looking straight at him.

Len clasped his hand over his mouth to stifle a scream.


End file.
